Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

by Samantha Power

Allen Lane £25, pp640

Polyglot, hyperactive, dripping with old-style sex appeal, Sergio, as he was known to the many thousands of people who crossed his zigzag path, was regarded by envious fellow diplomats as 'a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy'. He was born into a Brazilian diplomatic family and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in the Sixties, briefly becoming a student revolutionary. But it was the United Nations that ultimately shaped his life, giving him a fresh international identity and a raison d'être. Moving from one hellhole to another - Bangladesh, Lebanon, the Balkans, East Timor, fatally in Baghdad during the American occupation - he experienced at first hand the conflicting claims of power and morality.

Naively, the young Vieira de Mello thought that the UN was somehow capable of existing separately from the powers which financed it, controlling its destiny. 'I am partial,' he would exclaim. 'I am partial to the mission of the UN.' The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, conducted in disregard of the UN peacekeeping force, gave the lie to such notions. Standing at checkpoints as Israeli tanks roared through, Vieira de Mello understood how little power the UN really exercised.

Posted to Cambodia, he returned refugees to territory controlled by the Khmer Rouge, with whom he sipped French wines. He explained in true Sorbonne style that one should know evil in order to withstand it. In the Balkans, Vieira de Mello shopped for presents to appease the repellent Slobodan Milosevic. His enemies called him 'Serbio'. But he did smuggle civilians out of besieged Sarajevo, earning the respect of Bosnians. After the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, conducted under the gaze of UN peacekeeping troops, he began to re-examine his own beliefs.

Those who represented the interests of the Great Powers would always place narrow interests above beliefs in common humanity. All one could do was strive to be where it mattered, using charm and eloquence to speak for the broken world beyond the conference rooms. In East Timor, where he supervised the country's independence, Vieira de Mello broke the UN rules by handing over power to the Timorese as early as possible. It was his best moment.

On his desk in Geneva, there was a cardboard box filled with the names of contacts he hoped to use one day. He wrote thousands of notes to those he had met in remote parts of the world. In charge of the UN's human-rights programme, tipped for the top UN job, he began to read philosophy again. Unlike the neocons who dreamt up the Iraq war, his ideas were based on a daily re-examination of the real state of the world. It wasn't enough to entertain theories, applying doctrines indiscriminately. Democracy couldn't be made to happen, no matter how well-intentioned its backers. It would take root only where individuals were made to feel safe and able to live in dignity.

Did the officials among whom Sergio moved care about such things? He would reply that one must act as if the powerful did care or could be made to, even when it was clear that they didn't. Tirelessly, to anyone who would listen, he explained that human rights lay between civilisation and anarchy. Failure to believe in the cause of humanity meant that the world would pass into the hands of violent, thwarted men.

Samantha Power is the author of a justly admired history of genocide. Until recently, when she referred to Hillary Clinton as 'a monster' in the course of an interview with the Scotsman, she was a key Barack Obama foreign policy adviser. She has since resigned. Power writes fluently, assembling large amounts of information with verve and understanding. Mercifully, she is lacking in coyness when it comes to describing her hero's failings. Until his last years, Vieira de Mello was unfaithful in the compulsive, trouser-dropping style of his own hero, Albert Camus.

More seriously, the desire to please those capable of helping his career frequently warped his judgment. When he met George W Bush in the White House, the two middle-aged men exchanged banter about workouts. But Vieira de Mello did warn the President that neglect of human rights would prove to be a disaster, destroying America's reputation. When important truths needed to be told, he never lacked courage. It was this as much as his allure that won him the admiration of his peers and made him instantly attractive to those who met him for the first time.

An al-Qaeda suicide bomber destroyed most of the hotel in which the UN were lodged, trapping Vieira de Mello beneath tons of rubble. It appears he had been targeted personally, in revenge for the UN's collusion in the invasion, and he would have reluctantly accepted this reasoning. He had opposed the war, accepting the assignment unhappily because he was asked to go there by Kofi Annan. Ignored by the American occupiers, patronised by the arrogant and incompetent US pro consul Paul Bremer, he knew that his presence in Baghdad was a terrible mistake.

'Fuck God,' he told those who came to rescue him. 'Just get me out of here.' The world's most powerful army lacked even the most basic tools to dig him out. 'There must have been a moment, hopefully not a long one,' Power observes, 'when he realised that he was every bit as helpless in his time of need as millions of victims before him.'

Our contemporary world scene isn't blessed with heroes and it is hard not to feel that we require not one, but many Sergios. Inspirational, wise in its rueful acknowledgement of the limitations placed on humanitarian action by the powerful, Power's book is a fitting memorial to a great and generously flawed life. It is also one of the most engrossing and frightening accounts of our troubled, conflicted century.